Gamification

Current and past projects

  • Erasmus+ KA2, Strategic Partnership, Project: DEMOGAMES – Democracy and Games: Analog and Digital Game-Based Learning Tools for Youth Work. The project runs from September 2019 until August 2022 and will be carried out in cooperation with international partners from the field of youth work and result in a toolkit on democracy education reaching beyond academic circles. For more details see here.
  • “Democracy & Games” project, funded by Demokrative (2018-2019). Let’s Play Demokratiebarometer, print & play Material for three short educational games can be downloaded at https://demokrative.ch/index.php/de-de/projekte/db-spiele.
  • Publication “Game design as a teaching tool“, funded by the Lehrkredit of the Universität Zürich, (available only in german).
    Spielentwicklung
    “Spielentwicklung als Lehrkonzept. Eine Handreichung mit forschungsbasierten Beispielen zum Thema ‘Demokratie'”, authored by Rebecca Welge, Saskia P. Ruth, and Robert A. Lovell, 2018

Events & presentations

Game-based learning in higher education – game design as a teaching tool

The traditional lecture at Universities is more and more replaced by interactive teaching methods. Research shows that active participation of students in the classroom has positive effects on their learning success. So called ‘active learning’ combines different elements like writing, reading, talking and reflecting. This teaching style is mainly based on interaction and cooperation between students. Games contain many of these elements. That is why we observe a trend towards the inclusion of games in class room settings. Games are artificial activities, taking place in a specific context, and setting goals and rules for gamers. Most importantly, games provide an experimental learning environment, they offer the possibility to interact with each other, to test different strategies, and to evaluate individual actions.

In spring 2016, Dr. Rebecca Welge and I conducted the seminar “We the people – Designing Democracy” at the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, (at the M.A. and PhD level). In this course we used game development as an innovative teaching approach in higher education and invited students to get actively involved in the process of designing a game about democracy. One goal of the seminar was to develop and design a board game that illustrates both the core elements of democracy as well as trade-offs in designing democratic systems. Another goal of the seminar was to motivate students to approach the highly abstract and complex topic of democracy in an active and engaging way.

The course was structured along the lines of the research topic (in our case “democracy”) and game design. The aim of the course was to develop a board game prototype which should include both a cooperative element in which players, together, need to ensure a minimum level of democracy (i.e. electoral democracy) to win the game; as well as a competitive element, so that each player should aim to maximize different functions of democracy, striving to implement different models of democracy (majoritarian, consensus, liberal, deliberative, or participative). To help us with the complex issue of the game design process we cooperated with the instructional game designer Robert Lovell.

spieldemo-12016-04-06-20-13-35

In general, using game development as a game-based learning and teaching tool is applicable to many different topics. It lends itself especially well to teaching in the social sciences – due to the affinity of game design to modelling human interactions, but it can be transferred to other areas of study. The educational benefit of game development lies in its unique potential to motivate students to approach highly complex and abstract scientific concepts and theories. It creates an inclusive and participative learning environment – animating students to work together both as researches and designers. With the final goal of the course in mind – a game prototype – students approach the course topic at hand with a different (goal oriented) perspective. Each individual session of the course is highly interactive and students themselves are allowed to influence the progression of the course itself. Moreover, translating highly complex issues into game mechanisms and elements enables students to train the process of knowledge transfer hands on.

In december 2016, we have been awarded with additional funding from the Lehrkredit of the University of Zurich to further develop this educational tool and provide supporting information for other teachers to apply this instrument as well. Moreover, to distribute the idea of game design as a knowledge transfer product we cooperate with the association Demokrative which fosters civic education in Switzerland.

See information on dissemination workshop: Aktives Lernen durch die Entwicklung von Spielen, Projektabschlussworkshop kompetitiver Lehrkredit UZH, University of Zurich, June 5, 2018.

See video on educational game development (in german):

gamification

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